You posted a role. Forty resumes came in. Your applicant tracking system ranked them. You looked at the top ten. You hired from those ten.

Here is the part most hiring teams miss. Some of your best applicants were veterans. They had the exact skills you needed. But they ranked number 28 and number 33. So you never scrolled that far.

The ATS did not reject them. It does not work that way. An ATS racks and stacks. It scores every resume against your job post and sorts them by match. The strong matches float to the top. The weak matches sink to the bottom of the queue. A human can still see the buried ones. But nobody scrolls to number 28.

That is the trap. A qualified veteran can sink low for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability. This guide breaks down why it happens and how to fix it. The fixes are simple, and they widen your pool without lowering your bar.

How does an ATS actually rank a resume?

Your ATS is a sorting tool. Workday, iCIMS, Greenhouse, Lever, and Taleo all do the same core job. They read each resume. They compare the words on it to the words in your job post. Then they score the match and stack the resumes from best to worst.

The score leans hard on keywords. If your job post says "project manager" and the resume says "project manager," that is a hit. If the resume says "platoon sergeant" instead, the system does not know those overlap. It sees no match on that term. So the score drops.

Recruiters then work the queue from the top down. Most never reach the bottom half. That is the whole point of the tool. It saves time by surfacing the strongest matches first.

The problem shows up when the scoring is wrong. A veteran can be a perfect fit and still score low. The words on their resume do not match the words in your post. So a strong candidate gets buried under weaker ones. They are still in your system. You just never look.

Why do qualified veterans rank so low?

It comes down to language and structure. A veteran writes about real work they did. They just describe it in military terms. Your ATS reads those terms and finds no match. Here are the five reasons it keeps happening.

Keyword mismatch between military and civilian terms

This is the biggest one. The military and the civilian world use different words for the same work. A veteran ran logistics for a 200-person unit. They might write "S-4 NCOIC" on their resume. Your job post says "supply chain coordinator." Both describe the same skill. Your ATS sees zero overlap.

Same story with job titles. "Fire team leader" is a frontline supervisor. "Operations chief" is an operations manager. "52 series" or "91B" is a mechanic. The veteran knows the translation. Your system does not.

MOS codes and rank that mean nothing to the scorer

Veterans often list their military job code. An "11B" or a "25B" or an "0311" is precise inside the military. To your ATS, it is a random string. It matches no keyword in your post. It adds nothing to the score.

Rank has the same issue. "E-7" or "Sergeant First Class" tells you this person led people and ran budgets. The scorer reads it as noise. The leadership behind the rank never gets counted.

Resume formats the parser struggles with

Some veteran resumes use formats built for the military, not for civilian parsers. Heavy tables, two-column layouts, and text inside headers or footers can confuse an ATS. The system may read the words in the wrong order. Or it may miss them.

Do not overstate this one. Format is rarely the main reason a strong veteran ranks low. Missing keywords and no tailoring to your specific role cause far more harm. But a messy parse can drop the score further on a resume that was already fighting a keyword gap.

Knockout questions that misfire

Many teams add screening questions to the application. "Do you have 5 years of commercial experience?" A veteran with 8 years of identical military experience might answer no. They read "commercial" and rule themselves out. The system then drops them from the running.

The skill is there. The question was written for civilian career paths. It filters by the wrong signal. You lose a strong applicant over a word choice.

Degree screens that block experienced veterans

A hard degree requirement is a quiet veteran killer. Plenty of veterans ran complex operations for years without a four-year degree. If your ATS auto-ranks degree-holders to the top, those veterans sink. We cover this in depth in our guide on skills-based hiring and dropping the degree screen. The short version: a degree is a proxy for skill, and for veterans it is often a bad one.

Is this an ATS problem or a job post problem?

It is both, and the order matters. The ATS scores against your job post. So a vague or jargon-heavy post produces bad scores no matter how good the tool is.

If your post is stuffed with civilian buzzwords and hard requirements, the system rewards resumes that mirror that language. Career civilians write resumes that match. Veterans often do not. So the gap is built in before the first resume even lands.

Start by reading your own post like a veteran would. Does "5 to 7 years of commercial experience" rule out someone with 10 years of military experience in the same skill? Does "bachelor's degree required" block people who can do the job? We walk through this in our guide on auditing job reqs for veteran-hostile language.

Fixing the post does half the work. The cleaner your post, the better your ATS scores the people you actually want. Then the veterans who fit start ranking where they belong.

How do you fix keyword mismatch in your ATS?

You do not need new software. You need a few changes to how you set up reqs and review the queue. Here are the moves that work.

Build a synonym dictionary

Most ATS platforms let you add keyword groups or synonyms. Use that. Map the common military terms to your civilian keywords. "Platoon sergeant" maps to "first-line supervisor." "Logistics specialist" maps to "supply chain analyst." "Corpsman" maps to "EMT" or "medical technician."

Now when a veteran uses their own words, the scorer still counts the match. The strong applicant stops sinking. This takes an afternoon to set up for your most common roles. It pays off on every req after that.

Switch to skills-based criteria

Stop scoring on exact titles. Score on what the person can do. List the real skills the job needs. Inventory management. Team leadership. Equipment maintenance. Crisis response. Then weight those over job-title matches.

Skills travel across the military-civilian line better than titles do. A veteran who never held your exact title may have done the exact work. Skills-based scoring catches that. Our guide on how to evaluate a veteran's resume shows you how to read past the jargon to the skill underneath.

Have a human review the buried half

For any req that drew military applicants, do not stop at the top ten. Scroll. Have a recruiter scan the next twenty resumes too. Look for military terms the scorer may have missed.

This is the fastest fix because it needs no setup. It just needs someone to look. Train your recruiters on what military leadership and skills look like on paper. A recruiter checklist for screening veteran applicants makes this quick and repeatable.

Should you source veterans directly instead?

Fixing your ATS helps you stop losing the veterans who already applied. But the strongest move is to stop waiting on the queue at all.

The queue is reactive. You post a job. You hope the right people find it. You hope they word their resume in a way your system rewards. That is a lot of hoping for a critical hire.

Sourcing direct flips it. You go find candidates who already fit. You reach out to them. You skip the keyword lottery entirely. For roles where veterans are a strong fit, this is faster and cleaner than mining your own buried queue.

This is where a veteran talent pool earns its keep. Best Military Resume gives midsize employers direct access to veteran candidates whose experience is already written in civilian terms. Our pool adds over 1,000 new veteran profiles every month, and more than 60,000 resumes have been built on the platform. You search for the skills you need and reach out. No ATS lottery.

You can still post the role and run your ATS. Direct sourcing just gives you a second, faster lane. If you want to see how a midsize team blends the two, our guide on mapping a military career field to your open reqs is a good next read.

How do you keep veterans from dropping out before the offer?

Fixing the ranking is step one. But a veteran who ranks well can still walk away. Slow responses, confusing steps, and screens that feel hostile push good candidates out the door.

Veterans tend to read process signals closely. A week of silence reads as "they are not serious." A knockout question that feels like a trick reads as "this place does not get me." They move on to an employer that responds.

If you fix your ATS but lose people later in the funnel, you net nothing. Tighten your whole process, not just the front door. We break down the common leak points in our guide on why veterans drop out of your hiring process.

One more note on AI tools. Many ATS platforms now bolt on AI scoring and ranking. That can help or it can deepen the keyword bias. If the model learned from civilian resumes, it may rank veterans even lower. Use it with care. Our guide on using AI to source veteran candidates responsibly covers the guardrails.

What is the payoff for fixing this?

Veterans bring traits midsize teams need. Leadership under pressure. Comfort with structure. A bias toward getting the job done. The veteran unemployment rate sat at 3.5 percent in 2025 per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, lower than the 4.2 percent rate for nonveterans. These are people who work. They are not stuck for lack of skill. They get buried for lack of keyword match.

When you fix the ranking, you do not lower your bar. You raise your visibility. The same strong candidates you wanted all along start showing up where you actually look. And the protections under federal law, like USERRA from the DOL Veterans' Employment and Training Service, make a veteran-friendly process worth getting right.

The simple version

Your ATS is not the villain. It is a sorting tool doing its job. The problem is the input. Military wording does not match civilian keywords, so strong veterans rank low and you never scroll to them.

Fix the input. Clean up your job posts. Add a synonym map. Score on skills. Review the buried half of the queue. Tune your knockout questions. Do those five things and the veterans who fit start ranking where they belong.

The faster path is to skip the queue and source direct. A pool of veteran candidates whose experience is already in civilian terms means no keyword lottery. You search, you find the fit, you reach out. If you want direct access to that pool, reach out about hiring veterans through BMR.